The big news of this summer was that Edicy will become Voog, a vastly updated and improved successor of the current version. Many of you have already switched, others will follow suit in the autumn — after we've polished the user experience and brought Voog out of beta.

Another important announcement is that we've switched to a faster and more reliable network service provider. Therefore we've also had to change the IP-addresses of our servers. Think of them as the postal codes of the server world.

We've changed everything below Edicy — the servers are new and more powerful, the system architecture on them is more optimized and there are more people taking care of the tech stuff — and your peace of mind. As the next and final step of this transistion, you'll soon be switched to Voog, the new version of Edicy.

Those of you who have imported (pointed) an external domain name to your website on Edicy, have to point it to the new IP-address: 85.222.234.11. The change has to be made at your nameservice provider or domain name registrar.

Old settings will cease to work sometime after 01. December 2014, so please make the change before this date. If you do not know where you can change your domain settings, please contact support@edicy.com and we'll sort it out.

Our ecosystem has expanded significantly over the last couple of years. Thousands of exceptional custom websites have been built on Edicy. Most of them are crafted by our partners and freelancers from around the world.

One of the most requested features by a swarm of web developers has been the ability to alter the looks and components of individual pages and blog posts. For example to give each blog post a unique thumbnail or cover image. Or apply a different background image for any of the pages on a site.

Today we are happy to announce that this major update — custom data fields — has been released and available on all paid accounts. You can now bind any kind of data not only to entire site but also for each page or blog post separately.

Let's say you want to set a different background picture for each of your page. Before you had to create a new layout for every page to make it happen — or use extensive JavaScript. Now you can just set up a drop area for the background image in the template for the website owner. In addition, you can call it out anywhere on your website with a unique id. This way you can set a background picture for your article and display it also on your front page as a thumbnail or cover image. A perfect solution for photo blogs.

The scope of possibilities is huge — unique background colors, Facebook post images and other OG-tags, text attributes, icons for menu items, configurable widgets like distance / price / tax calculators or Flickr galleries, page layout modulators etc. Go ahead, read our renewed APIfor more or jump straight to the examples. Feel free to contact us via support@edicy.com. We'd be really happy to help you get new flexible customer websites up and running.

Snipcart's shopping cart is a perfect tool if you are looking to build your e-store with Edicy product catalogue. And to make it even better, Snipcart's team took their time to really work it through and share their Edicy experience with others.

The simplicity of Edicy does not only rely on the everyday usability, but also on the fact that we are offering a one-stop-shop for running a site – hosting, content and domain management, code editor with a knowledge base for more technical people, as well as a super friendly helpdesk.

And we've been rewarded a thousand times for our work – each day sees more and more tailor-made sites built on Edicy, pleasing on the eye, helping people in their daily life while offering and finding different services.

omaasi.com / youroffice.ee – these two sites created by Velvet Digital Paper have been out there for more than a year. Both of them use a similar one page layout onto which a blog and product list has been built using our catalogue tool. Both of the sites are also optimized to look good on mobile devices – a feature common to most Edicy sites unless deliberately built differently.

tallinnbicykleweek.ee / minuunistustepaev.ee – a revolution in the streets and evolutionary changes in mindset. Edicy has the honor of hosting sites of a number of NGOs who not only care about the people and physical environment around them but have transformed this knowledge into beautiful and functional websites. With the help of designers of course. Two of them, Tallinn Bicykle Week and "Day of my dreams" are combining photos and simple messages to interact with their viewer – a smart move since photos of actual people and events are powerful means of telling a story. Especially when speaking about web – long texts belong to books printed on paper.

filmmusic.ee / tab.ee / lightbiennale.ee – sites for different festivals and events, promoting Estonian composers, architectural heritage and the magical work of light designers. All of these sites originate from dudes at aku.co. These sites create a good showcase of what can be done with our catalogue tool – events, authors and publications can be filtered by name, event title or other characteristics to create a holistic overview for the visitor. The coding of these three sites has been done by Fraktal.co and Newtime.

"I'd like to start selling stuff on my Edicy website. How can I?" -- a question I hear at least once a day. Good news is that there already are some online stores on Edicy. If your vision isn't too specific, it's fairly simple to build one too. Here's one of the most popular stores on Edicy — Mileedi, a flowers-by-mail service.

What's an online store?

An online store differs from an "ordinary" website by having little bit more technical complexity.

You need to have a way to

show the products

place an order

pay it up.

All of this is readily available for you in Edicy.

Larger, more established online businesses of course need more than that. There are some special components that are not available for such simple and convenient webstores — integrations with enterprise systems (inventory, CRM, logistics, book keeping) or user-specific options and purchase history.

Odds are though that you don't run a million dollar business looking for a new e-commerce platform. It's more likely you are someone like ourselves — running passionately a small business and getting started with your online success.

So let's see how you can do it with us.

1. Show me the products

The easiest way to show your products — if you only have a handful of them — is to create a normal content page for each of them under "Products" section. Add pictures, galleries and videos for visitors to get an overview. Write texts, include tables, add PDF-s with product overviews to specify the details. Link to reviews, add testimonials to build trust.

If you have a large number of different stuff on sale though, you ought to have more than that — new products should be listed first, best selling items need a place on the front page. Visitors should be able to group and filter them both by category or price or other characteristics. You need a product catalogue. There's an early beta version of such tool already available for a number of Edicy Plus users. So if you want to try it out just contact us and we help you set it up.

Another great option is to combine Edicy with Ecwid, a separate e-commerce tool that takes care for everything — provides you with a product catalogue and lets you manage prices, payment mechanisms and shopping carts.

2. Let me order it

Most often people only buy one item at a time. A pair of boots. A picture. A house. Sometimes you manage to sell more though. Two different pictures? A house AND a pair of boots? Could be.

Single-item-selling is rather easy to be set up with Edicy. Just set up a link for placing an order for every product separately.

Allowing user to order more than one product at a time is a bit more difficult — you'd have to provide visitors with a "shopping cart" for that. Visitor adds anythig to the cart first and then places the order for the whole pack. There's one great free component that you can either set up yourself or ask our support team to do it for you. It's called simpleCart — just go on and check out how conveniently it works.

If you decided to use Ecwid in the previous paragraph, you already have a shopping cart out of the box with them.

3. Let me pay for it

There are many options to choose from — a half-online method with money transfer in the end (works well with local businesses) or full online experience — paying with PayPal or credit card.

Credit card payments provided by PayPal — and Paypal wallet itself — work well with Edicy, you don't need any additional service. Just add a Paypal checkout link to each product or use simpleCart shopping cart in-between and done you are.

If you have more specific needs — for example direct payments through online banks are pretty popular around Europe — you can set up basically any payment mechanism with Ecwid.

Again — we are eager to help each and everyone of you get started with e-commerce just go on, contact us and we'll quickly help you out!

Didn't find a suitable website design from our theme gallery? Tired of your old design? Do you need a specific functionality, layout or structure? Don't worry, our growing list of partners would gladly help you out with all your customization wishes.

We have added a direct link to the design theme panel for ordering a custom design from our partners:

We've also launched a coaching program to help design agencies get started with Edicy. Even though it's easier to build sites with Edicy compared to Wordpress, the program teaches best practices, tips and tricks for creating advanced websites. During the first month of its existence, there are already 8 agencies that have graduated the coaching program. Join us!

One option is to let any designer or agency in the world to build a exceptional custom design for you. There's already a number of companies with experience in creating websites on Edicy. They can also import an existing website or a Wordpress template onto Edicy easily.

If you are a designer, there's always an option to create an Edicy theme yourself. Here's a checklist — the Edicy standard theme definition. Use it as your reference point. In case you need our assistance we'd be glad to help you. Just send us an email and we'll guide you through.

Now, if you are great at what you do and want to make this theme available to other Edicy users too, show it to us. We are offering to buy really great Edicy themes with complete PSDs for $500 a piece.

If you've been diving into design coding in Edicy or were just thinking about it then here's a small treat for you. Most of our recent stock designs are open-sourced in GitHub for everyone to download, read, fork, change, pull and push.

Since we are using Git internally to move around stock design files it seemed logical to make them public in the process. The repositories for designs can be found at https://github.com/Edicy

Feel free to fiddle in the source and not that we desperately need help but we'd be more than happy to see pull requests from you guys.

Can't deny — we are proud to see Edicy being recognised by a growing number of web developers as their platform of choice for the post-software era. That's why we've just released a new version of Edicy Developer Site. It serves both the newcomers and established Edicy developers as a central resource for building and launching exceptional websites with less hassle and more reward.

Our new Developer Site.

Repetitive tasks suck, especially when there's no end to that. Edicy lives in the cloud, so low level technical repetition like updates, maintenance and security are taken care of by us so that they reach all our users and sites simultaneously.

This way developers can focus on the unique parts of website development instead — carving unique designs, building up site content.

We've just launched a major update to our product catalogue feature. Since it has been useful only to bigger and more complex sites, this update brings simple-to-use catalogs closer to anyone using Edicy.

Our product catalogue tool lets you define custom objects models. Models have fields that site editor can fill to create objects based on these object definitions. These objects can be listed on site or displayed separately on dedicated pages.

This is how the product catalogue admin views look like in Edicy.

So it is more than just product catalogues. It lets you create objects for almost any purpose, basically. Therefore we call it “Catalogue”, which is generic enough. A few examples you can use the catalogue for:

List products with images, descriptions, prices

Create page with your company employees, each having their name, photo, contact information listed.

Set up job board with available job positions and their descriptions on your company.

In order to build up catalogue on site, you need three things:

Define object model that is a "template" to all objects in catalogue. Model declares the fields that each object in catalogue has. Examples of object model would be "Product", "Employee", "Job offer", each having their respective field sets. This is what we launched with this week's update.

Create pages where objects will be displayed. At the moment every object in catalogue needs a page where it belongs to, otherwise it cannot be seen by your site visitors. This is the part that is a work-in-progress in Edicy. In order to create these pages you need to customize your site design. We will roll out support for catalogues in stock designs in the near-future.

Add objects to these pages with selected object types. This means creating objects with the fields defined on their respective models. Object editor also got a big overhaul this week.

Please note that our product catalog feature is not a "one size fits all"-shoe solution by design in itself. Our approach aims to target these most generic usage scenarios. If catalog falls short on anything it is always possible to make Edicy work together with custom systems.

It is also tempting to reveal that new product catalogue also has a public API in private testing you can later use to modify objects outside Edicy user interface. More on that soon!